The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci , edited by Edward MacCurdy, is the sort of book that makes one?s own notebook look frankly embarrassed. Most people write down shopping lists, phone numbers, vague resolutions, and the occasional drawing of a cube that has gone badly. Leonardo used his notebooks to examine anatomy, painting, mechanics, water, flight, optics, architecture, warfare, proportion, geology, machines, nature, and the general possibility that the universe might be persuaded to explain itself if stared at hard enough. This Reprint Society edition brings together selections from the extraordinary papers of a man who appears to have treated curiosity not as a personality trait but as a full-time occupation with unpaid overtime. Leonardo was painter, engineer, anatomist, inventor, observer, draughtsman, designer of improbable devices, student of bodies, rivers, light, movement and machines; in short, the kind of person who makes the phrase ?multi-talented? sound like something invented for people who can play the piano and do invoices. The pleasure of the notebooks is that they show genius not as a finished marble bust, but as a working mess: questions, sketches, observations, theories, lists, corrections, fragments, sudden insights and magnificent unfinishedness. Leonardo did not simply produce masterpieces and then stand around glowing. He worried at problems. He measured, compared, imagined, doubted, designed, abandoned and returned. The mind here is not tidy; it is restless, hungry and forever leaning over the next thing with a pen. There is a lovely irony in reading Leonardo?s private notes as a published book. These were working papers, not polite essays composed for admiring strangers centuries later. Yet here they are, pressed into covers, because history eventually decided even his rough thinking was more interesting than most people?s best behaviour. A casual Leonardo diagram has a way of making whole shelves of later certainty look as though they should perhaps sit down. MacCurdy?s edition belongs to that grand old tradition of serious reprints: solid, learned, unshowy, and content to let the material do the astonishing. For readers interested in Renaissance art, science, invention, anatomy, engineering, notebooks, creativity, or the alarming spectacle of one human mind ranging about with insufficient supervision, this is a fine thing to own. It is not merely about Leonardo?s achievements; it is about the process of attention itself, which in his case seems to have been both miraculous and slightly inconsiderate to everyone else. Fine copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. The books themselves are in very good condition ? indeed, I would call them Fine ? and they come with old plastic protective sleeves. The plastic, however, is now elderly, brittle and coming away in places, which is only fair: even protective coverings eventually discover mortality. It is mostly still there, but the next owner may prefer to remove it or replace it with something less inclined to crumble in a dignified manner. A handsome set for anyone whose shelves could use more Renaissance genius and fewer excuses.…